boredom is always counter-revolutionary

A little late, as always, I’ve recently finished The Coming Insurrection. This is the text that the French Interior Minister has called a ‘manual for terrorism’ and whose authors, ‘the Invisible Committee’, are allegedly the Tarnac 9, allegedly responsible for the sabotage of TGV lines last year.

I shan’t really comment on the case itself, as it has received a fair amount of coverage elsewhere, not least on the ‘Support the Tarnac 9‘ blog. My general impression, following Giorgio Agamben’s article in support of the group, is that the events have revealed the paranoia, hysteria and volatility inherent to the French government’s treatment of those whom have been too-easily labelled ‘terrorist’. Certainly, The Coming Insurrection prophesies more and increased violence of the type seen recently in the Parisian banlieus and in Greece, which in these post-9/11 days practically invites immediate and excessive police repression; but the fallibility of the material situation, the weakness of the case against the Tarnac 9, which Alberto Toscano has called the ‘legal obscenity of basing arrests on a text’, all suggest that this has become a symbolic-ideological battle for the French government, blown out of proportion in order to maintain a state of fear that instantly criminalises any radically oppositional voice. ‘Pre-terrorism’ is conjured up in a manner not dissimilar to Cold War, McCarthyite vilification of any suspected ‘Reds’. As Gérard Coupat, the father of Julien Coupat of the Tarnac 9 has said, ‘They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs’.

So, to speak solely of the text itself with as little speculation as possible on the trial, the events or the figures involved, it’s worth considering the Situationist influence on The Coming Insurrection. Much media attention to the group, the Tarnac 9, has sought not to examine what they are saying or doing, but to simply cast them as the return of Baader-Meinhof or Action Directe-type ultra-left militancy. Attention to the book itself has more often made the connection with the Situationists, and particularly Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The first thing that I notice, however, is that The Coming Insurrection is much more reminiscent of Raoul Vaneigem and The Revolution of Everyday Life in its affective calls for affirmative and immediate action, rather than the dense Hegelian logic and attention to history of Debord.

The Coming Insurrection begins with a declaration of the state of play: the situation in which late capitalism has found itself, particularly in France, particularly following the Parisian banlieu riots of 2005; and the direction that opposition to modern consumer society must take. The text’s logic – if not its literary style – contains perhaps the Debordian element, characterised by Society of the Spectacle’s assertion that ‘In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false’. (For Debord this was a détournement of Hegel, of course; and The Coming Insurrection is itself loaded with détournements, including those of Debord). So, in The Coming Insurrection’s first two paragraphs, we are told that ‘the future has no future’, that ‘from left to right, it’s the same nothingness’, and that ‘it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote’. Though it doesn’t make the link so explicitly, the text essentially argues that we are living in the society of the spectacle, but the impression of vitality and the pretence of substance that Debord’s spectacle once offered has now passed. We live on the corpse of spectacular society, and deceive ourselves that it still lives and breathes.

The second concern of the first chapter (‘From whatever angle…’) is the rejection of existing modes of protest and opposition, again forecasting more of the type of unorganised, insurrectionary violence seen in 2005. An introduction, added earlier this year, adds the recent Greek riots as another sign of things to come. Such forms of protest, such outbursts of energy, constitute a negation of politics, or, perhaps, a politics of negation:

No one can honestly deny the obvious: this [2005] was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics”.

The new forms of invisible insurrection are the reason, we are told, for the anonymous and communal authorship of the text itself, under the name of The Invisible Committee. Although this Deleuzian emphasis on invisibility and amorphousness has attracted some criticism within anarchist circles, the author(s) deny their own authority: they say that they are mere ‘scribes of the situation,’ whose task is to simply show things as they currently exist:

It’s the privileged feature of radical circumstances that a radical application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough to say just what is before our eyes and not shrink from the conclusions.

The following seven chapters, the bulk of the text, each offer a critique of a different aspect of modern life. The chapters (or circles, ‘First Circle’, ‘Second Circle’, and so on) focus on: selfhood and subjectivity; schools and hooliganism; work and leisure; the city-country divide, and the idea of ‘the network’; the economy and a critique of zero/negative growth; the environment and a critique of eco-capitalism; the nation-state and the West.

Toscano associates the type of analysis offered here as ‘more in keeping with the recent concerns of critical French sociology than with prophecies about Homo Sacer’. The text, really, is a mish-mash of the last forty-or-so years of critical and cultural theory. There are Foucauldian tones in the discussions of the workings of power and control (instead of, say, history or capitalism) in relation to eco-capitalism, and even some notes of Adorno, formally in the aphorisms that punctuate the text, and thematically in the concerns over capitalist society’s anti-logical reversals (truth as falsity, and so on) and the relations of the part to the whole: ‘the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture’, ‘[literature] is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accommodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom’.

Another parallel with the Situationist International (SI) comes by way of The Coming Insurrection’s glorification – or at least theoretical justification – of hooliganism and rioting. More specifically, this reminds me of the British Section of the SI, and their post-SI group King Mob, who sought most actively a radicalised form of street violence by way of gangs and football thugs. However, whilst the first and second-wave Situationist critiques of gang violence and rioting was based on what Dave and Stewart Wise of King Mob would later call a ‘hysterical over emphasis of violence’, The Coming Insurrection is rather more critical. The text argues that the 2005 banlieu riots were not a moment of control being lost, of ‘dispossession’, but instead a moment when territory was (re)possessed:

People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organise, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and common enemy.

As such, in these moment of strategy analysis, the text is particularly proximate to the SI’s analysis of the 1965 Watts Riots, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Commodity Economy’, which contests the reading of that event: not as a race riot, or a class riot as such, but a revolt against the commodity. Likewise, with its Deleuzian inflections, The Coming Insurrection’s strategy analysis is reminiscent of the work of people like Eyal Weisman, who has studied the ‘military urbanism’ of the Palestinian occupation and the nomadic forms of resistance consequentially engendered.

For me, there are two areas of uncertainty in the text. Firstly, the ‘Fifth Circle’, which critiques the negative growth movement (such as the left-ecological French group La Décroissance and associated doctrines of voluntary simplicity) as capitalism’s self-reform, or eco-capitalism. However, many of the text’s accusations are sweeping and unfounded. For example, the text argues that the various slogans and exhortations to live simply and economically of the negative-groth/eco-capitalist movement will result in a regression to ‘daddy’s economy, to the golden age of the petty bourgeoisie: the ‘50s.’ Yet these claims are not substantiated, and moreover the text is itself full of anti-urban sentiments and romantic pastoralism perfectly commensurate with the idylls envisaged by the groups that the text stands itself against. (This is to say nothing of the return to nature of the Tarnac 9 themselves).

The problem, I suspect, is one of affiliation and its denial. The Coming Insurrection disapproves of nearly all organised contemporary anti-capitalism and cultural opposition, yet never clearly differentiates itself from these already existent entities. For example, the magazine Casseurs de Pub (apparently the French equivalent of Adbusters) is cast as a means of testing out the new social ties that will lead to capitalism re-establishing itself in the green-era in its own terms. Yet the text itself seems to share so much with the philosophy of Adbusters, which is partly foreboding eschatology and partly nicey-nicey, be-good-to-each-other, platitudes.

The final four chapters (‘Get Going’, ‘Find Each Other’, ‘Get Organized’, ‘Insurrection’) offer some avenues for praxis, despite the text’s earlier claim that things will happen for themselves. Adding to the Adbusters-style ethical condemnation of consumer capitalism, The Coming Insurrection occasionally reads like the poorly-digested situationist theory and individualist adventurism of Crimethinc:

Escaping this fate calls for a long and consistent apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive experiments. It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight…

We are told that we cannot wait, that we must do something, even if ‘we can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin’. We are told that we must avoid ‘all existing social milieus’, and avoid becoming one ourselves. We are told that we must form communes, but the definitions of the commune are so vague (‘The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality’) and so reluctant to offer any conceptualisation of practical organisation, that we are left in the dark as to how a commune differs from a social milieu, or (more positively) how a commune may resemble the type of council communism advocated by the SI. The text is littered with such contradictions: between inevitablism and an adventurist insistence of the necessity of immediate direct action; between ethical exhortations and this-is-so pronouncements; between individualistic action and images of new community. The SI rarely advocated practical action – and when it did, the actions were micro (détournement, dérive and so on) – so The Coming Insurrection’s uneasily alliance of a Situationist critique with anarchist direct action feels impatient and devalues much of the text’s purely theoretical content.

There are many powerful ideas in this book, though perhaps little that any reader of recent Continental theory hasn’t come across before. Those who associate this text – and, by extention, the alleged actions of the Tarnac 9 – with 60s and 70s forms of direct action are incorrect: this has been passed through a more Deleuzian, poststructuralist paradigm. As document of contemporary oppositional critical theory, the text is invaluable, bringing together many useful and disparate theoretical currents. However, its desire to move beyond theory into application is more problematic, as the theory it bases itself on is so distanced from material praxis.

I suspect that this text’s future may resemble something like British Situationist Alexander Trocchi’s sigma project, which was itself introduced by an essay entitled ‘The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds‘. Though more concerned with a cultural coup-du-monde than militancy and politics, Trocchi’s project never fully realised itself or achieved the cultural purchase it desired, because it was perpetually vague, immeasurable in its successes. The notion of ‘invisibility’, it seems, has yet to be formulated in a way poses a threat to a capitalistic order determined by the visual.